Welcome to: alan cookson art berlin
This is the first book I published on Amazon Kindle titled "Dead Chickens Don't Talk". It comprises short stories of various lengths. However, they are written in single, short sentences stacked on each other. Something you might expect with some poems. However, they are stories rather than poems. I feel more at home with this writing style as I never learnt grammar. My schooling comprised punishment and humiliation until I was expelled from school, illiterate and deeply traumatised. I use instinct to write and not any grammatical knowledge.
THE CREATIVE
This is the book cover of: The Incurable Weight of Love. A lifelong journey of trauma. A story written to help me better understand my jigsaw puzzle-riddled life of trauma, my damaged brain, and hopefully to finally gain freedom. However, it was also written in the hope it might help others. I published it on Amazon Kindle.
It is available as both eBook and the printed version on Amazon Kindle.
Hope you will find it worth it and most of al that it will help you in some way.
ART
MUSIC
VIDEO
WORDS
AND?
THE INCURABLE WEIGHT OF LOVE
DEAD CHICKENS DON'T TALK
Since early childhood, I have been plagued by deep shame, immense social anxiety, a sense of being a failure, rejection, repeated violence, punishments, constant humiliation, excruciating loneliness, and many other issues. Childhood was not kind to me in the slightest.
Consequently, after escaping the horror of my childhood home at a young age, thinking I was leaving all this horror behind, what followed was more of the same: a mass of troubles, turmoils, and massive drama, some of which were of the worst kind. And it would stay this way for most of my life, even though I travelled around the world and experienced much.
Completely unaware for most of my life that I had severe ADHD and autism issues. Neither did I know that my animal brain's emergency survival system, the Fight-Flight-Response, had become locked in survival mode at a very early age. The result was that I lived in almost constant overwhelming fear and would speedily slip into panic and fleeing mode. The strain on my body was immense.
My lack of education and deep septic emotional/psychological wounds combined to make me hugely allergic to anything suggesting schooling. Hence, I was forced to educate myself purely through instinct. I taught myself the English language, later came Dutch, and after this, German, all with limitations. I also taught myself various trades, such as psychology and engineering, all learnt via instinct. In other school subjects, I learnt what I could in my way.
Although I had much human contact, I remained utterly terrified of people. I couldn't trust anyone. Not even myself. Deep within, I longed for human love and warmth and, above all, to feel safe. Yet I was so severely damaged I was unable to allow these.
Such was the intensity of the excruciating loneliness that I had known all my life, which increased daily. I also had severe verbal communication difficulties and harboured deep fear and mistrust of verbal words that made things far worse. Unable to carry on dealing with the loneliness and isolation, I turned to what seemed like the only avenue of escape to me. Speak with images rather than words.
This is how I became an artist—not to be an artist but to do what I couldn't do with words out of my mouth—speak and express. Over the years, I have developed many themes, such as children's rights, women's rights, miscarriage of justice (having spent two terms in psychological torture prisons), the displeasure of violence and wars, etc. I also have humour, which has kept me alive. I still seek light, love, warmth, and feeling safe in the darkness that is my life. I guess I still have a long journey ahead. And will I ever make it?
The journey to this point was long due to the brains fleeing panic learnt in childhood. I fled apartments, cities, countries and jobs the moment people started to come too close, even though this was what I wanted deep down. I've had jobs as a deckhand, ship engineer, motor mechanic, heavy machine mechanic, international truck driver, local deliveries truck driver, painter and decorator, machinist, cleaner for private and at factory, barman, cook at a night bar, actor, events security man, cable man for television film crews, shipyard mechanic, worked for a city's engineering department, office typist, taxi driver, engineer instructor in Africa, air conditioning installation, trade fair exhibition constructor, childminder, a social worker in children's homes, shop assistant, a line worker at a car assembly plant and repair man at the same place, a mechanical engineer on machine construction and repair on-site, film extra, film and stage scenery painter and constructor, and more.